Response

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Free but never easy

While I acknowledge that there are spurious requests, having been reading through some requests on whatdotheyknow.com (a wonderful website, allowing you to make FOI requests which can then be published for everyone's benefit), it's quite clear that the [Freedom of Information] Act is essential (Freedom of information: caught in the act, 4 January). It has in some ways replaced one bureaucracy with another, but the new one is far less kafkaesque and more accountable. Giving people the legal right to demand answers from arrogant (which seems to be one of the main reasons for people wanting to withhold information, arrogance) or corrupt organisations was a wonderful step.

zwicky online

• It will take more than the FOI act to get the truth out of the government, they will always find a way around releasing anything they don't want in the public domain.

BoredSilly online

• Without much harsher penalties for those who seek to delay and prevent people accessing both FOI and data protection rights it remains, largely, a toothless piece of legislation. It fails to cover companies engaged in providing public services; government bodies, such as the police; the foreign office deliberately stalls requests; and it treats members of the public as an annoyance rather than the people who pay for it all.

What would be better would be the mandatory online publishing of pretty much every bit of data by public bodies (after all, everything is already "published" and stored – it's just not accessible – to make it available online would be very cost effective). Anything that wasn't published would have to apply for an exemption and still be open to FOI requests.

The simple fact is that the public own and pay for every document published by the government and other public bodies, even if they try to obfuscate this by placing crown copyright on everything. Why on earth should we go cap in hand to the authorities to ask for a chance to see what is actually ours?

StivBator online

Phoney prediction

2010 won't be the year of the mobile, just like 2005 wasn't (Richard Sambrook: The world will look different from outside the BBC, 4 January). And 2006 wasn't. And 2007 … well, you get the idea. The truth is that 300m smartphones globally in 2012 is actually still not a very high penetration rate, and the infrastructure still isn't in place outside Japan and South Korea to use these smartphones to their full potential.

LondonManc online

• The infrastructure isn't there and mobiles are too expensive to use. The networks have this "we're smiling but actually we're conning you" air about them and always have. A typical example is the extortionate coverage charge some of them charge for mobile broadband.